Pitiful benchmark performance

> I've been browsing the Doug Bagley Shootout pages:
>http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ and Erlang does
> spectacularly badly in
> quite a few areas where it shouldn't really be quite that bad.
Some of the benchmarks are pretty convoluted in Erlang. I'm thinking
specifically of one of the Hash benchmarks, which does a lot of conversion
between lists and atoms inside an inner loop. To wit: